I just had to wipe drool off of my chin any tasting notes so that we can all vicariously enjoy it with you. I have been revisiting a couple of EOTs 2010 Productions and I am impressed with the change. The mouthfeel on the Manasai has really improved. The Manmai has gained allot of depth going from light and grassy to having hints of wood popping up.

Back from a long hiatus of Belgian beer and Scotch whisky. Brewed up the 2002 Tai Lian from YS yesterday. Dry woods, tobacco smoke, and a sharp finish. Also reaffirmed that aged puerh is one of the most complex tastes I've ever experienced.

Just received the email from Eot regarding 2012 offerings. Looks interesting.

Being a Pu newbie, it took me a good couple hours of intense google cross-reference to figure out what tea I'm actually drinking at the moment: CNNP's "Ripe Mini Tuo."

According to the YS page it's from 2007, but it didn't have a year listed when I bought a bunch of these little guys at my local tea room.

Smooth, earthy, straightforward flavor, intensely dark soup with a lot of little particles. I'm on my 5th infusion and the color is less opaque, but the flavor is remarkably consistent. I think this might become a favorite everyday tea.

Well, let's not quite get too spun around. It's an assumption, and like in a blogpost by Gingko, where longjing sellers have problems because people don't believe it's good longjing at good prices, we *could* be assuming that the perfectly mindblowing GFZ is not actually what it is, due to our misconceptions about the market.

Now, we generally think this way because there is a pattern of elite consumers having leedle hidey-holes full of organic gardening and ranching created specifically for the safe consumption of the Party Bosses (check LA Times somewheres), while normal people have to wonder whether their pork is safe to eat, and make a run to HK for their baby formula. So, it's not a stretch to say that there are specific areas of LBZ, GFZ, Bingdao, etc, etc, etc, as well as places we've never heard of, that are not actually available to us mortals.

However, this is just a heuristic, and as heuristics go, it can be pretty poisonous to enjoying your tea! Besides, I suspect that elite demand generally circles around tea that few/nobody else has ever heard of. So it's really just your usual well-off Chinese, and all the tea merchants that cater to them that are the competitors.

The price of GFZ @ Nadacha is correct for decent GFZ. GFZ is about $200/1kg. The normal retail price is that the retail bing (357/400g) is about the same price as the per-kg cost. That pays for wrappers, shipping, pressing, travel, enough maotai to kill an elephant, cover cost of tea that don't sell, and profit.

I grabbed a sample of the 08 Xiaguan Bao Yan Mushroom a few years back, and later on, the mushroom itself. The flavor is okay, but despite it's storage, it's still rough. On a side note, i'm keeping my sheng wrapped up, in a pretty constant 80+ humidity, and no mold, nothing. I'm hoping for something resembling aged tea in 2018, but part of me is starting to doubt it...

Nearing the end of sampling the stuff from a recent YS order... had the 2011 Menghai Pu Zhi Wei (potent!) and the 2002 xiaguan ripe tuo, which had some very nice woody/camphor notes in it. All in all, a great day with pu'erh...!